Noah Hawley (Fargo Week)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Expert's on Expert. I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by Modest Mouse.

Hi, there. Hi.

Jacques-Marie Marge.

Jacques-Marie, she's, Imani's in her, Jacques-Marie, Marge. New sunglasses, looking very cool.

Yeah, and if you wanna hear more, which I know you do, listen to the fact check.

How could you resist? Try not to skip forward all the way to the fact check right now, because you're so hot to hear about the Jacques-Marie Marge. Today, to finish out Fargo week, to close strong, and you heard the reverence that both of the actors we spoke to this week have for this man, Noah Hawley. Wow. He is the creator and the showrunner and the screenwriter and the director of Fargo.

That is a lot.

But you probably love him from Fargo. He also created and ran Legion, Lucy in the Sky, My Generation, The Usuals, his books, just to name a few, The Anthem, Before the Fall, and The Good Father. And, of course, season five of FX's Fargo is out now, which you probably have already consumed. And if not, I'm so jealous.

Noah is so smart. This is such an interesting episode.

Yeah, he definitely felt more like when we interview a professor from Harvard.

Yes, it doesn't feel esoteric, which sometimes is the fear when we have showrunners or directors on. It doesn't feel like that at all.

He's just an all-around polymath. Hardcore. Please enjoy Noah Hawley. We are supported by Viator. Viator is a tool you can use to plan and book travel experiences around the world.

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♪ He's an objects man ♪.

♪ He's an objects man ♪.

♪ He's an objects man ♪.

Welcome. Thanks for being here. Hi, Monica.

Nice to meet you. I would ask if you're always up this early, but with the noise, I would imagine it's hard to ever sleep.

Well, I am up this early. We don't ever record this early. This is unique.

I appreciate you changing it up.

We did this one other time. Do you remember, I guess, we had Monica.

when I crashed my Viator one day over?

Yeah, it was an expert.

I don't remember, but yes, you crashed.

It was an expert. We were willing to do it at like seven in the morning and I used to live a thousand feet that way through this gated neighborhood. And I have this electric bike and I'm coming over this hill, it's pitch black. It's like six in the morning and I'm flying on this electric bike and right as I crest the hill, there's a car coming. So I swerved to the right and then immediately there's a parked, it's like a set piece happening in real life.

Oh, I'm so glad.

I don't want anyone injured in the making of this podcast.

I'm not a big believer in suffering for art. I think it's misguided and macho thing.

I agree. Yeah, that's actually a really great first topic, because I look around me and I hear these horror stories. I'm not gonna name names. Well, I'm gonna name some names and then we're gonna cut them out. I hear these experiences of these different directors.

Yeah, you can do it as a nice guy. There's no reason you can't do it as a nice guy, and there's no reason you can't just do your best work and go home to your family. Yeah. And I've certainly been exposed to the other side of it, of people who believe that the drama has to exist off the screen as well as on the screen. And I think that's completely inefficient.

Right, right.

And I read the 800 page book on the making of 2001, A Space Odyssey. I don't know if you read that at all.

I haven't. Please save me the 800 pages.

Well, I read it. Two people almost died. You know, when they put the ape makeup on, you've got about three minutes of air. No way.

Oh, my God. Oh wow.

And the same with the space helmets. So they almost killed a couple of actors because Kubrick was like, keep rolling. And so I read this 800 page book while I was making Lucy in the Sky. And I thought, well, if anyone wrote a book about this movie, they'd say they made the movie and that would be the book, because it was just, we just showed up every day, we made the movie. And I think all the energy's on the screen.

But then again, you know, 2001, A Space Odyssey, it's a masterpiece. Of course.

Yeah.

I feel like it's an excuse to just be horrible. Like I need this. I've earned it.

I'm not sure. Well, let's put it this way. There's like a level of dedication and perfectionism that exists probably for Fincher, who's willing to do 78 takes. I admire what he's doing. And then in that process, people are likely going to suffer.

But there's a difference, I think, between what you're calling suffering and what David does. I mean, yes, it's a lot of takes within the energy of the day, but it's not-.

Almost dying in a girl's hands.

Psychological manipulation and melodramas off the screen. And Ridley Scott, who I'm working with on this Alien series, told me a story about when he made Alien, he would always have an AD or something, jump out at the actors at some point during the day and scream in there to scare the crap out of them.

You know what I mean?

Because, as a young director, he thought that that energy was required to keep the level of fear up on the set. As an older man, he knows it's called acting. You don't need to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's some pretty famous Dustin Hoffman quotes about that. similarly. He had stayed up all night long for Marathon Man and then he got around another actor and he said, you know, that's a fine approach, but also you could act. Right, right. Which is what you've been paid to do.

Yeah, it's interesting. I work with a lot of British actors, especially in the Fargo world, and what I always love about them is that they can be really grounded and real, but they know what movie they're in. They know that it's a slightly heightened tone, and sometimes you get the more methody American actors and it's hard for them to keep in mind that there's comedy in here. Yes, there's violence coming. Yes, we're facing these forces of darkness, but the tone is elevated, and the Brits are so good at the energy of denial versus acceptance.

Well, it's almost built in, culturally, right? They're just not easily riled. Right. It's almost like it's a cultural pride. They're sipping tea as bombs are cascading down.

Right, and the fun is to just keep increasing the pressure until they crack.

Yes, yes. This is very early for me, so I'm a little out of my sorts, but I know stuff about you already. within like the first two minutes, you're sitting here.

Okay, tell me.

Okay, you're pretty hyper-vigilant. Is that a fair assessment?

Vigilant in terms of being aware of my surroundings. Yeah, I pay attention.

Yeah, yeah, me too.

I'm aware, and a lot of it in comedy is, it's all material, right? So you say something and then 10 minutes later, if I don't remember it, I can't bring it back.

Pay it off.

Yeah, but I'm also a dad, so you're always like, that's a sharp corner.

Right, how old are your kids?

Well, they're older now. I have a 16 and an 11-year-old.

Are they in school in Austin?

They are.

Did they start here in LA in school?

My daughter did a year here, but I've only really ever lived in LA maybe three years total over the 20 years of my career. I started in San Francisco and then I came down to LA and I worked on the show Bones for a couple years, but then I got my own show and then we filmed it in New York and then we moved to Austin and then, somewhere around the first season of Fargo, I had this panic that we were doing it wrong, like we'd retired to Austin and we needed to get back. So we moved back to LA. My wife was pregnant and within like four months, they picked up Fargo and then we moved to Canada.

To shoot there.

And my wife says that I was making Fargo and she was living it, so. There's kids in school and you know, 40 below zero. In the great north. Yeah.

But you're from New York.

I grew up, yeah, in the West Village.

I gotta say, well, I'm just a hyper Fargo fan, okay? Like I talk about it on here all the time. I just could not be more blown away, particularly with season five, for many reasons. A, it's just the most incredible season, but then also I find it so impressive that by my estimation that season five could possibly be the best season so far. It's like its own unique triumph.

Thank you, I really appreciate that. And my hope was that, if I was gonna do another one, that the only acceptable review was back in Better Than Ever. It sort of concentrated Fargo this year. The episodes are really tight and short. There's a lot of suspense and energy to it.

It's hard to know what that critical mass is. And I think when you're inside of it, you certainly aren't the best to evaluate. Not that I'm agreeing with your criticism of it or anything, just it's hard to know critical mass in that. When is it fatiguing?

It is, and my motto is what else can I get away with? And so you wanna push the envelopes and certainly going into a fourth year of Fargo, it's sort of what haven't we done? Going into a fifth season and going back to the movie, feeling like we've finally earned the right to engage directly with the movie Fargo. It did just create a story that was super streamlined and was really fun. The trick of it was there was a lot of comedy in the scripts and then the moment that you make it real and you bring in the violence, and especially the domestic violence, managing that tone becomes a lot trickier.

Yeah, I even heard it like inside thing. I wanna know about later to that exact point of like. when have we dipped into a hole we shan't climb out of is quite a task.

Yeah, and you see that Coen brothers tone, it requires a sort of narrower bandwidth. You can't descend into farce and still maintain the drama and the violence, and you can't get too brutal and still maintain the comedy. So you're always trying to adjust where you are.

Yeah, anytime you're dipping in and out of different, almost genres, yet a cohesive tone, I think that's the most artful tightrope walk one does. And so few people do it successfully. Like, if you look at all the Pulp Fiction knockoffs that came, it's like he too is a master of. you're laughing at this violence. Scorsese, you're laughing at the mailman being shoved in the oven, but there's a handful.

Yeah, if you look at the show, you know, a lot of it has to do with where music is and what music is. And if you're managing multiple tones, you can't score the comedy or you'll lose the drama and you can't score the drama. otherwise the comedy goes away. And so it becomes very tricky sometimes to figure out where the cue goes and what the cue should be. And this season, especially with Juno and the suspense and the sense because she is this creative problem solver.

She's in MacGyver mode.

Yeah, that reminds you that there's something playful that's happening here. But if you overuse it, then it pulls the teeth out of the suspense. It's a complicated dance that goes all the way from script to the locked cut.

Yeah, it's very, very precise.

Have you gained confidence over this amount of time? Like when you started season one, I assume it was more of like, oh God, are we about to do something crazy? And now it's gotten a lot of validation over time. I assume you've gotten more confident.

Yeah, you know, it was such a terrible idea to adapt Fargo, the movie, that it was actually pretty liberating to feel like, well, two people are gonna watch this and one of them is gonna hate watch it. But the other thing was that, under the auspices of making a Coen Brothers movie, I could get away with things that I couldn't get away with if it was just me. So I could say like, well, it's not that I want a 10 minute parable sequence. But it is a Coen Brothers movie. So it feels like that's in the cinematic language of their storytelling.

You're also inheriting an audience in a sense that has already declared a tone they love. So there's also a lot of benefit to it, I'd imagine. But I wanna skip back. So when I asked to get you on here, it was of a fan of Fargo, right? And then, of course, I was also aware of Legion.

Yes.

But fucking Poor Things, I'm like, wow. They articulated this thing that men have in the most elegant and incredible way. It's so brutally honest. It's the Anthony Bourdain story. And then this season of Fargo is so feminist in the most delightful way.

Fraternal.

Fraternal twin and his brother created the rookie. His brother has created a few TV shows. Wow. Okay, so this is all the insanely exciting stuff I learned yesterday, but can we talk about what life in Manhattan was like with that mom and a twin brother?

Yeah, I mean, I grew up in Manhattan in the 70s and 80s and my mother was a writer. Her mother had been a writer. Her mother, who had emigrated from Ukraine when she was five years old and never had more than an eighth grade education. She ended up as the assistant to Walter Lippman, who ran the New York World and was a very famous essayist at the time. And she was a playwright and she moved in that sort of Maxwell Anderson circle.

And she was born in 37, right? So she was.

Yeah, so my parents, they were just before the baby boomer. All the hippie stuff. Like. we tried the commune thing early on, but my parents ended up the grownups at the commune which is not a good time. Driving the school bus with no headlights, but somebody's gotta be on the roof with the flashlight.

Oh, right, right. So I've talked about being molested on here. As a dude in 2020 found that to be one of the most impossible things to talk about publicly. So where does this woman, born in 1937, have the gall to admit she has been a victim of incest? Because that's gotta be the single most taboo topic.

Well, certainly it was. It's something that people don't wanna talk about. And at that time, as I said, it's so rare, quote unquote. You know, but I think part of it was being in the New York second wave feminism, environment, knowing the Andrea Dworkins and Susan Brown Millers and the Gloria Steinem's. And there's a certain empowerment, I think, that comes from seeing other people telling their stories.

Right, that was the premise.

This idea of incest survivor was very political at the time. Political in the sense that there was a criminal element to it, right? And there was this sense of consequences. But what survivor meant to her was you had survived it and you had moved on. And then what was born in the aftermath of that book was the self-help industry, which came up in the 80s and had a lot to do with incest.

Well, now, as adults, you and I can appreciate how brave and incredible that that was the road she took. But I can also imagine, as the son and a young kid being pretty embarrassed, that this is mom's work.

I don't remember feeling that. When you're a boy raised by a feminist mother, I mean, our parents sort of train us anyway, right? You always think that your parents are normal. That's what normality is. And because this was happening before adolescence, for me, you don't have that same kind of embarrassment.

I have a similar mother. Minimally, I saw modeled a woman being capable of absolutely anything. And I think that's really impactful.

You know, it was such a positive thing. That said, that survival, that idea that you had that experience and moved on from it, didn't prove to be psychologically true for her. Do you know what I mean? I don't think for anyone, right? Yeah, and so my parents were sort of madman generation.

It was catching up with her.

Yeah, so part of what I've done in this year of Fargo, because there's always a character in Fargo who is denying reality to themselves, just like Bill Macy in the movie. He did this terrible thing. He was doing everything he could to stay away from it psychologically. He wouldn't even admit it to himself. And so those characters, like Kirsten Dunst's character, Martin Freeman's character, that denial of reality is always tragic for everyone around them.

I didn't notice the parallel until you just said it, but in a weird way, it's almost the same device as Bourne, where he doesn't know why he's got all these skills. And we get that same sense from her when we meet her, like, oh, she has this bizarre skill set. that seems pretty inexplicable as a woman at the PTA meeting. Does she know, and it's funny that it can be self-imposed, that device.

Yeah, and it's not that she's actually ignorant of her past. It really is, well, I don't wanna go back there, and if I admit it, this life that I've built is gonna go away. And so I'm gonna do everything I can to pretend it's not happening for as long as possible. It endangers her husband, it endangers her child. But because she's such a fun and mischievous character, we don't ever go, like, this is the world's worst mom.

Right, she's been so reckless with everyone she loves.

But what I love is that she teaches her daughter how to be prepared, without teaching her to be afraid, which I think is a really critical thing, because there's too much fear in our world. But it's good to be prepared for things, just not to live in fear of them.

How does being a twin, because twins pop up all over the place in your work.

There's a lot of brother stuff, yeah.

Yeah, but even the notion that Ewan McGregor is playing an identical twin in one season, and then you have twins in a few different.

At the Kitchen Brothers in the second year.

And then, outside of the Fargo universe, in your book, The Good Father. Yes. He suspects his son has killed somebody. He newly has twins, isn't that nice?

Right, he does, and then The Punch has brothers in it. Do you have?

I have an older brother, so I have the most little brother complex you've ever seen. He's five years older, so I was convinced I was terrible at everything. Right. I just lived to be invited to anything he did. But we have a shared identity.

Yes, it's certainly formative. And what you don't really have as a twin is personal space. I married a woman who's an only child, and she'd be happy to never be alone again. I relish my privacy because I spent 18, 20 years not necessarily sharing a room, but definitely sharing a life. Same high school, same college.

Was he a poli-sci major as well?

There were no majors at Sarah Lawrence, where we went.

Don't you have a degree in political science?

I have a lovely BA from Sarah Lawrence. I don't know what you would necessarily say it's in, but I did study a lot of political science there. And then we went to New York to try to be rock stars or whatever. But then there did come a point in my mid-20s, because it's not just my brother and the band, there's these other filthy, penniless men, right? And you're just like, I kind of feel like I want to do something that doesn't involve this group activity everywhere that I go.

People are paragliding off of things.

Yeah, and really just sort of established my own thing. for a decade. I was publishing, and my brother had started doing some screenwriting, trying to break into that. And then my first book was Option by Paramount, and I ended up adapting it for them, among other projects that got set up. And so we were suddenly on a parallel track.

It's pretty comical, really. Back to the wife, because I, too, married an only child. I'm going to make some guesses. Do you love to shut the door in the bedroom when she leaves it open?

Let me see. You mean when we're in there, or?

Yeah, just for me, I want that fucking door shut, because my brother had access to me at all times, and just took whatever he wanted from me. Oh, yeah. And I'm like a big, I want the door shut.

I think it's more the mom thing. I think it's more the, I would shut the door, but then what if the kids need something in the night, you know, and it's like, well, they're a little bit old now. I think they can figure that out.

Do you like sharing food from your plate with her?

Yeah, I don't mind that. Oh, you do? No, I don't mind that.

And then, Sarah Lawrence, did you watch the doc on Sarah Lawrence?

I did, yeah.

Well, it was just the setting. I hate to make it a Sarah Lawrence doc, because it's unfair to Sarah Lawrence.

It is, but wasn't it in the title?

Yeah, which is so unfair, but yeah.

What did you think of that, doc? Monica? and I loved it.

It's a wild story. It's a unicorn, which is why those things, like Wild Wild Country, it's so tabloid, and the behavior of that man was so crazy. But, to be fair to my alma mater, the vast majority of that story-.

And to Bill Lawrence.

Yeah, the vast majority of that story happened in New York City, outside of the school.

None of it was even on campus. Had nothing to do with the school.

Yeah.

My fascination with that was-.

Maybe remind people, or tell people.

Oh, yeah, so there is a man gets out of prison. His child is going to school at Sarah Lawrence. He moves in to her apartment. She is sharing that with four or five other kids, and slowly, over the course of him living there, he grooms all of them to become members of really a cult, and then he takes them out into the city, and they live in an apartment, and they just have the most destructive, dystopian existence. And for me, I was like, we're so much more vulnerable mentally than we ever want to acknowledge, and it's just below the surface.

Yeah, and it started as a New York Magazine piece that I read, and, of course, if you're a certain level in Hollywood, everyone's always calling you to say, do you want to do something with this? And the thing about that story, for me, for all its salaciousness, is I need something positive. You know what I mean? You need a triumph. I made this movie, Lucy in the Sky, which was a fictionalized version of this sort of diaper astronaut story.

I don't know the diaper astronaut.

Well, it was this woman who had gone to space, and she had started this affair with this other astronaut.

At the space station?

Back at NASA. Oh, sorry. Back on Earth.

Did I go to MECU?

You know, he had. basically, it hadn't lasted long, and then he had gotten involved with this other woman, and so the female astronaut in question had driven across the country to confront the two of them with some half-cocked kidnapping scheme, and the story had been that she'd worn a diaper for the drive.

You know that's ringing a bell. She was in such a hurry.

And so what I was interested in doing was taking a tabloid story, which, as we know, is a story that robs people of their dignity, right? Yes, it's exploitative. And I was like, let's give her her dignity back, because the reality is she was just a very troubled woman who had these big feelings and didn't know what to do with them. So when I looked at that Sarah Lawrence story, I was just like, well, I don't see what the upside is. Who am I rooting for in this story?

It's just a tale of mass destruction, really.

It's a heartbreaking story as a parent of these children with such promise in their futures who were totally derailed by a predatory criminal.

Narcissist, yeah. I guess my interest in it is the exact interest I have in the Stanford Prison Experiment. You know, I'm preoccupied with how people dominate other people. I think that's my primary focus, and who's gonna try to dominate me and know where the potholes are. Wow, this is interesting.

Yeah, because it doesn't seem possible. We tell ourselves. It's so transparent. Why would you? It's not like he's an attractive man, and he's coming in, he's somebody's dad, so I guess he has authority.

I think you are lost. Searching. Yeah. And he's purporting to have had this extraordinary life as maybe a CIA agent or something, so he's really activated their own sense of romance and what life could be. I mean, there's just a lot going on there.

Right. Charisma's a real thing, we see it. Certainly we see it in this town. I mean, it's sort of the business of an actor to be charismatic.

I hope you're feeling it right now, or I'm powerless.

I mean, that's a good thing. There's at least four feet separating us. Certainly, in our politics, we're feeling the power of charisma.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Yeah, I like that. Have you heard the one, comparison is the thief of joy? Yes. That's a good one too. It is.

If you want to give therapy a chance, start with BetterHelp. It's entirely online and designed to be convenient. To get started, all you have to do is fill out a brief questionnaire and you'll be matched with a licensed therapist. So stop comparing and start focusing. With BetterHelp.

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Was your dad around? I just have to ask that.

My dad was around until my 30s. He had been an actor in New York. They met because she went to a play that he was in and when he had kids, he went out and got a job and worked first at United Press International and then was part of the birth of cable television, worked at the first satellite news network. But he was in sales and he would travel first the country and then the world. and ultimately he went to work for Westinghouse and traveled the world trying to sell country music, television and the Nashville network to the Japanese.

Oh, wow. Did he succeed in that endeavor? Yeah, yeah.

But it also gave me a real sense of personal responsibility. He realized that he had to provide for his family and he was such a great partner for my mom. and you see it reflected in the work. You see it reflected in the Wayne character, the husband, this exploration of masculinity.

Yes and being able to not be threatened by a woman who's dominant and strong and engaged.

Wayne's a guy, he's got a car dealership, he brings home the money, but she's just better at the decisions.

And his mother, again, it makes total sense. he's married her.

Very strong mother and it's like he just wants to play floor hockey in his socks and watch Real Housewives. Like he doesn't need to be the boss of everything. I mean, I feel the same way. I am a boss. I get to make so many decisions and then when I go home, I'm like, why do I have to be the boss here too?

Yeah, yeah. So back to New York, I too had this moment where I was two years out of high school, so I was living in a flat in Detroit with three other dudes, and then I had this moment of like, uh-oh, you're gonna look up in 30 years and be in this flat. and I had this insatiable drive to not do that and then moved out here by myself and was insanely lonely. and in that loneliness, started writing, because it was like my only escape. and I'm curious what was happening in San Francisco.

Yeah, I had started in New York. In New York, I worked for the Legal Aid Society in family court, and so I was one of two paralegals for like 40 attorneys doing abuse and neglect cases, termination of parental rights cases and juvenile delinquency cases, so both civil and criminal trials in a New York family court. You're really such a band-aid in that and there were attorneys who had worked there for so long that a child who had come in as a neglect case and then a termination of parental rights case was now a parent whose child was coming in, you know what I mean?

They were watching the entire cycle.

And they had to switch which they represent. and it was so demoralizing for people. and I was there for four years in New York and that's where I started writing fiction, really as a way to kind of process the stress of that and the emotion of it. and then, when I moved to San Francisco, I looked for similar work, but they didn't really have that kind of paid work in San Francisco, so yeah, I went to work for some law firm that represented Shell Oil Company.

Okay, but so you're in San Francisco, Conspiracy of Tall Man's. your first book, that's 98.. How long had you been in San Francisco before that book gets published?

It was like three years. San Francisco had such a great writing community and there was this group called the Writers Grotto there, which had been started by these six writers, including Ethan Kanin and Poe Bronson, who basically just didn't want to write in their kitchens anymore, so they just rented office space, and when I published, I ended up meeting them and then becoming part of that group. We had 21 writers and filmmakers with their own offices in this old converted dog and cat hospital. It was a sort of dream come true. We had handball on the roof and we played basketball and there was always someone to have lunch with.

Right, it mirrors Sweden in that way.

Yeah, you sort of show up at the party and everyone's like, what have you been up to? And you're like, well, the book's coming out and I'm writing a feature or whatever, and it's like you're holding up a mirror. It's what my wife calls the velvet rut. It's a lifestyle town and you can wake up one morning and you're 45..

So is it safe to say you had a similar version of what happened in New York there?

I don't want to say I outgrew it, but the Hollywood work really took off. I was single and I was like, well, there's nothing really holding me back from seeing where this wants to go. And I had written, I think, three TV pilots by that point and I thought, well, if any of these ever gets picked up, I need to know how to make a show. And so I came down here for this pilot staffing season that we used to have when all we had was broadcast television.

Is this in 04?.

Yeah, I did the rounds and I had some options of what to work on, but I went to work on Bones because Hart Hansen, the creator, said, you're gonna learn how to produce a show here, and he was good to his word.

Yeah, so you do Bones for three years. Then you write another novel, The Punch. Then you create, I guess, The Unusuals in 09.. Then, in 2010,, you create My Generation. Then, 2012,, The Good Father.

Which means 2013 for the writing of it, et cetera, yeah.

Can we just, for one second, inflate publicly Warren Littlefield because Warren was producing this project? I had and I immediately fell so in love with him. And then I was delighted in my research to find out that you're really involved with Fargo because of Warren. Is that safe to say? He calls John Langrad at FX and pitches your version to him.

Yeah, I mean, Warren and I had made My Generation together, and I can't stress enough, if there's anyone listening to this who's looking for advice, find a mentor. That's great advice. I have many of them. And, just as a slight digression, I always offer to anyone who writes for me, I always say, you're in the family, now, call me anytime. No one ever calls me.

Well, I can speak for them. I have had the hardest time in my life availing myself to advice and mentorship, because I'm so panicked that I don't belong here that to ask you for help would be to acknowledge that. This last year, I found myself calling two people for advice and at 48, that was the first time.

Well, get out of your own way, man. I mean, you know what I'm saying? I'm pushy, that way, I guess.

All I'm saying is I don't think it actually comes from arrogance. I think it comes from total self.

No, no, I don't think it comes from arrogance at all. I think people either get overwhelmed or they don't take me seriously. They think I'm just being nice.

Yeah, they don't wanna put you out. They're codependent, maybe.

But if someone offers me, you're gonna hear from me. And even now, I tracked down David Fincher a couple of years ago because I thought, oh, he could answer this question for me. And we'd shared a DP, Eric Messerschmidt. I was like, can you put me in touch with him? And then David was the nicest guy.

Well, and he, by the way, full circle payoff, he proves the opposite of what we were suggesting, that you have to be an asshole to be enormously effective and successful. He's like David Carradine in fucking Kung Fu. This sweet man is gonna take my hand and walk me across the finish line? How is this gonna unfold?

I know, but he's so savvy. I've learned a lot from him. So much of what my job is just creative problem solving, whether it's on the page or in a production. And Warren and I are similar, rarely is the answer to yell. But if the answer is to yell, who should yell?

So you don't really have trouble, even though you were around a lot of stories of women being abused, basically. You don't really have a problem with men, it doesn't sound like, trusting men.

No, I'm not alpha in that way. Although what I always found was that alpha is not really alpha.

Go on.

This is a topic Monica and I talk about a lot.

Well, you know, it's an interesting thing about leadership, right? Is that the loudest guy isn't necessarily the leader in the room. And I was never the pushiest. I was just always gonna do my thing. And it was part of the twin thing.

It's kind of the George Washington approach. Say less and just keep marching and people slowly go, oh, this one's not full of shit, let's hop behind.

Yeah, and it's leadership the right way, which is. there's no insecurity to it. So many bosses, they have that imposter syndrome and they tend to take it out on people because they don't feel like they deserve what they've got or that their ideas are great, but they're in a position of power. And I just feel like to have a healthy sense of yourself, and respect for others is the best way to lead.

It's portrayed always as the hyper masculine chest pounding, but I don't think that's what an alpha is.

Yeah, I always like to confuse my peers in Hollywood by reaching out to them. You know, like when Ryan Murphy and I started competing in the awards in the same category, we were both at FX. I was called him up and said, let's have lunch. And he seemed very confused by that.

You know what I mean? What's my angle?

I reached out to Sonny, who does beef. I love the show, good luck. And people are so grateful to have a human moment.

Also, and I say this often, of all the different roles in Hollywood, I think the one that really deserves the very most respect is showrunner. I think it's the hardest, most all encompassing. You need so many different skill sets. I think it's so impressive when people do it successfully. And, of course, you should all be friends, because no one else really knows what you're going through.

Well, and it's such a complicated word that it's almost meaningless to people. You know, when you say showrunner, one of the things that I don't like about it is there's no art in that word.

Yes, it sounds very managerial.

It feels like the guy at the air traffic control versus the artistry of the writing and the filmmaking, et cetera. But especially the bigger showrunners, every time you go into production, you're the CEO of a $70 million production, $100 million, $150 million production. If you're Greg Berlanti or Ryan Murphy, you know, you're talking about a billion dollars of capital that you're managing for these companies. And as a result, you have relationships with the Ted Sarandos's or the Zaslav's or Iger in a way that sort of transcends, I make a television show. And you can use that power to elevate other voices and all those things.

Yeah, perhaps. Okay, let's talk about directing. What's the first time you direct? Is it on Fargo?

No, I did a short film when I first was working down here. Fox Searchlight had a program called Search Lab. I don't know if it ran more than a year or two. Peter Rice was in charge of Searchlight at the time and it was basically a new director development program, a sort of cheap way to give a little bit of money to some directors and see if they did something interesting. And so I made a short film for them, was my first directing.

I want to applaud you, and it's almost maddening, but you direct one and two of season five. The first episode is fucking unreal. The set piece, starting with her exiting the car and going into the gas station and the shot selection and how you're telling the story and what piece we see, it's fucking, really annoyingly masterful. Thank you. I hope you're so proud of that episode.

It's spectacular. I am very, very proud of it. And, on some level, also proud of the decisions that we made that made it possible to shoot that in four days, or whatever it was. We found an airstrip that had been abandoned. We built the gas station.

Oh, my God, is it good. It's so, so impressive.

You know, I was heading into set the third morning and I was able to sort of quickly cut some stuff together. And there's a moment in the sequence now where she runs in and she stops because she sees this Bisquick on the shelf and that wasn't in the script. And so on. that third morning I called my AD and I was like, I need boxes of Bisquick and then I need these newspaper inserts that say the most important meal of the day. Yes.

This is film and TV making. Like you, have this enormous machine and quite often you're waiting for a piece of paper.

Right. What I realized while I was making it was it wasn't emotional. yet. Like, we needed that piece that was really going to make it emotional for the audience, which I think elevates it beyond just bullets flying.

Right. This is going to be an esoteric question that'll bore everyone. But when you're writing and you know you're going to direct the thing, do you find that you get incredibly detailed about each step? How are you managing what's on the page and what you end up going to shoot?

I write it so you can see it. Rather than just saying in action lines, the action, it will say close up on, it will say angle on. It specifies visually the story. Well, now we're looking at the object on the table. and now we're looking at her, looking at the object on the table.

Are you watching stuff in that same way? I guess I find that writing's the thing that'll take me out more than any probably other piece.

Yeah.

If they start breaking their own rules.

You certainly need a character logic and a big part of Fargo, right, is it says it's a true story. And so we can avail ourselves to coincidence and randomness and elements like that. that don't always fall into fictional stories that you watch. You know, the UFO is an example of the deus ex machina that you would be like, really? If it was just a fictional show, but that's what happened, guys.

And people might not even know the genesis of this, that the Coen brothers realized at some point, you can write this is a true story, but it doesn't have to be, that that was like some kind of weird breakthrough creatively.

Well, and I've had so many conversations with FX and MGM Legal about so many things, but they have never once said, you can't say something's true when it's not. I didn't know. So that seemed like the most obvious premise to contest.

Now, because the show, each season is completely different. You're basically launching a new television show every year. You're introducing all new characters. Nothing is a given. Everything has to be earned all over again.

What you're really trying to create is a state of mind. And it's a fascinating, elastic thing. When I first went into pitch FX, my version of Fargo, I said, why is the movie called Fargo? it takes place in Minnesota? Except that the word Fargo is so evocative of a place, what Joel and Ethan called Siberia, with family restaurants.

Yeah. I heard you say that this show couldn't have ever been a multi-season show, in that the big happy ending at the end of Fargo the movie is, life will return to normal. Sanity will resume. And so in that way, yeah, it's almost intrinsically precludes you from having a second season, but it did cross my mind while I was researching. Has it ever been talked about that you could actually bounce back and almost do second seasons of previous seasons?

I did talk to FX. at one point. I was like, does it have to be 10 hours? Because I could do two hours with Billy. I could see revisiting that character, but I don't think we wanna build a whole thing about it.

I was making a movie called The Judge and Billy Bob was leaving that movie to start Fargo.

Oh yeah.

And he's like, you know, I gotta go up to wherever the hell you guys shot. Calgary. He's like, oh yeah, I'm gonna be up there for it. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, Fargo.

He legitimized us for sure.

A thousand percent. I mean, that first scene between he and Colin Hanks. Yes. Where he's talking to him in a way that only Billy Bob can talk to somebody.

Billy was such a get for us. And I had written that first script, went to meet with him and he had called Joel and Ethan and said, is this real? Is this bullshit? And I offered to talk him through the story, the season. He's like, no, I don't need that.

This is a totally sidebar. My daughters are nine and 10.. The 10 year old just recently, I was watching Grand Budapest on a family vacation and she sat down next to me and she was like, why is this so weird? And I go, oh, well, Wes Anderson's got these elaborate sets and there's these big one-ers and the, no, I'm sorry, explain to her the mechanics of what makes Wes Anderson, Wes Anderson. So she got totally infected by it.

Yeah, I like to say that I have a low resting heart rate, but those guys, it's amazing.

Does it fuck with you? Like, give me some enthusiasm.

I haven't had a lot of interactions with them, but I've had a couple of good meals. I went by the place in Tribeca. They were editing whatever it was and they'll say like, you're still making that thing? You know?

They're not precious.

I've also had, like the world's most uncomfortable breakfast with them, where it's like, they're not talking.

Because they don't need to, they're just fine.

They say all their words on the screen.

Yeah, I just feel like I'm abusing my access. They hate me in this moment, you know? This. last time I did send Joel an email and I said, I hear you need a new pool, so I'm gonna make another Fargo.

It's always better for your own personal narrative, because you ultimately did this on your own. They could have held your hand and guided you through it, and then the reward of that would have been diminished.

Well, it's such a privilege if you think about the level of trust and the fact that they read that first script and they watched that first episode and they said, we hate imitation, but it felt like you were channeling us. They got excited, they engaged with the script, that motel scene, the do you have pets scene, they sent me a punch up, added some stuff, which was super exciting.

Yeah, to receive pages that you're gonna incorporate into your script from the Coen brothers is one of those few moments in life.

Yeah, it was thrilling. And then, I don't know if they've ever watched another episode, I don't know.

Right, right, who would know?

But on some level, that could be good, right?

I imagine we're all projecting a lot of preciousness about that movie that they actually don't have. I bet some part of them's like, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I've also had the thought, because every time we launch one, we would usually do a premiere event in New York and I would always go and there's bus ads and subway ads and I was like, how weird must it be for them, this movie they made in the 80s, to see A, more marketing than that movie ever got, 40 years later.

I hope it feels cool for them.

I'm sure it does, it has to. They're still relevant.

Yeah.

Okay, how do you decide? I don't know if every season, but certainly several of the seasons, have some sprinkle of sci-fi, supernatural, otherworldly.

I mean, it kind of depends, but when I look at the Coen's work, I see a lot of these characters that I describe as sort of elemental, where you feel like maybe they've always been out there, whether it's Anton Chigurh or the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse from Raising Arizona. The warthog from hell.

Yeah, yeah.

Particularly cruel to the littler things.

Exactly. Even the start of A Serious Man, which starts in the shtetl, and it's the debug and the whole Schrodinger's cat thing about. is he alive or is he dead. So the first year with Billy Bob's character, I just had this feeling, I think maybe not literally him, but whatever he is has always been blowing through the American landscape. He represents uncivility.

Yeah. And then the Swede now.

You know, and you'll see he's very much involved in the end game of the show this season. This idea of sin eating that was introduced in his story, which is God bless the rich. They're always looking for a loophole. So it used to be that, you know, if you're a rich man who sinned, then on your deathbed, you could give a guy two coins and he would eat food from your body and drink the wine. Then your sins would pass on to him and you would go to heaven and he would go to hell.

Roy Tillman. This is my favorite role I've seen Jon Hamm in other than Mad Men. I'm so fucking into the way he did every single thing. It's hugely impressive. I'm curious how you, again, it's a percentages thing.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh my God, did that just fucking gut punch. There's something so truthful about that.

Not only does he wanna be a baby, he's fighting for his right to be a baby.

He's fighting for his right to be a baby. Obviously, you don't wanna deny your own point of view, and you also don't wanna be heavy handed. Or is it even conscious when you decide how much of your own stances you're gonna let in?

No, let's call a thing what it is, really. In my mind, in writing. this season, I feel like everyone on the screen is a Republican. That was sort of what I was going into it with, which was like, I don't wanna have a political conversation, but I wanna talk about responsibility that we have to each other in a society. This idea of Minnesota Nice, which is the comic conceit of the movie Fargo, which is that when people have to be forced to be nice and that all they're gonna be is nice, they don't know how to let off steam and they just kind of break at a certain point.

Bible-pumping. I'm a citizen, I reject everything.

And so it's interesting to put those two in conflict, because on some level they're on the same side.

Yeah, one's only relatively better than the other.

Lorraine jokes, she's like, are you here to raise money for the new roof, for the orphanage or whatever? And he's like, I'm the fight the orphans for sport kind of guy. So neither of them like the orphans, neither of them believe in handouts to people. But she's saying, all right, but I mean, you just wanna be a baby. I feel I have a responsibility to keep civilization intact.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Yeah, I mean, I was gonna make a Star Trek movie with Cate Blanchett. Right, I mean, that's- And Rami Malek.

I'm thinking of that.

Could have had that. Right.

How do you let that go?

The best advice I can give you is don't take it personally. Someone doesn't like your script, it's not you. They're not saying they don't like you. Someone doesn't make your pilot, someone doesn't greenlight your film, or they release your film, but they don't promote it, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, yeah, I've had a ton of frustration and setbacks.

Oh, how's morale on set on that day?

Yeah, it was interesting, because I had talked to go back to Warren Littlefield, to him about it. And there is this sense of, so Napoleon on the battlefield, the emperor of France, next day, he's on an island, nothing to do, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To go from being emperor of France to nothing to do, that is a very weird day, right?

Yes, yes.

Because your adrenaline, your energy level, the amount of multitasking, that you're in the middle of.

It's cocaine, let's be honest.

And then suddenly to pull that plug and to be home going, well, what am I gonna do next?

And your identity.

Yeah, it can be very disconcerting and undermining of your sense of confidence, your sense of self. What Fargo has afforded me is a sense of arrival and security. You know, even if the Star Trek movie doesn't go or a film I wrote doesn't do well, I'm not in danger of falling back down to the bottom.

Right, right, right. You've internalized that.

Yeah, it's less impactful in that way. And I also, as I said, what else can I get away with? I mean, Fox Searchlight made Lucy in the Sky. It didn't do well for them. It's gonna exist forever.

I had a friend say to me, go back to the playground and talk to fifth grade dags and tell him you directed a movie at Warner Brothers with motorcycles and car chases. Do you think he's gonna ask, what did it do at the box office? Exactly. Just focus on what the fifth grader would be like, what the fuck? Like, really, we grew up and do that?

Yeah, I have two things to say to that. One is, I used to joke that there's a proud tradition in Hollywood of failing up, and I want in. Because it's like, there's worse things than having written the best pilot that didn't get made, right? People know. Or making the best pilot that didn't get picked up to series, it's a ladder.

Right, yeah, I just think it's easy to get married to stuff and I think the quicker in this business.

Oh, well, that's the other thing. Which is, I remember a writer said to me once, I just want to have published a book. And I was like, well, that's a past tense goal. You can't want to have done something. It has to be, what am I doing today?

The more you can live in process.

Yeah.

Have you befriended Stephen Conrad by chance?

I've met him.

You guys have a very similar thing happening. The musician, the writing, the directing.

He's a funny guy. I like him.

Did you see the- Patriot? The Patriot?

I did, yeah.

Whoa, what a fucking show.

I really liked it. There's a thing that we're thinking about collaborating on, actually. You Zoom with him, it's in a room full of guitars.

He's authentic, man.

Talk about a low resting heart rate. You cannot agitate that guy. Yes. It's good. To be.

Yeah, it can bring down the temperature all around you. Well, this has been awesome. I'm so glad you squoze us in. We were told you're flying off somewhere. Are you going home?

I was gonna fly back today, but ice storms in Texas, they don't know how to de-ice a runway, I don't think. So I'm gonna wait till tomorrow, I think, is what I'm gonna do. Okay, great, great, great. We'll have a nice lunch. We'll take it easy today.

Chill day.

Okay, wonderful. Anyone who's not watching season five of Fargo, you're missing the boat. And I'll add, you do not need to have seen any of the other Fargos. That's how it works. This could be the first season you ever saw.

But also go back and watch all the Fargos, because they're all amazing.

But in any order. Yeah. Start anywhere.

Inevitably, if you watch season five, you will be going back. I rest assured that'll happen. So awesome to get to meet you. You too. I'm very grateful you're making shit, because it's amusing me to no end.

I'll keep going. You, keep trying, Legion. I think I'm gonna hook you.

My wife and I last night, we were like, okay. They were just maddened with the wait for the next episode. And yet, when I was researching you, I was like, we need to give Legion another crack.

It's not a two-device show. You kinda gotta be in it. It's surreal and comedic in that way, but also, I try to make things that you wanna re-watch. And if you can surprise people, if you do something unexpected, they put down the other device. Because so much that we watch these days, you're on your phone, you're going, oh, he's the killer, and you know what I mean?

That makes my brain wanna explode.

Well, you know, there's this great book, The Weirdest People on Earth, Joseph Henrich. And it talks about how, physiologically, learning to read changed the structure of our brain. Permanently, if you're in the West, we've relegated areas of our brains that used to pick up on other things to reading. It's abstract and complex. And I have to imagine similarly, like your son, other people, I couldn't do that.

Yeah, I mean, I talked to a psychiatrist who said ADD is actually the best version of your brain for the modern world. The ability to multitask, there's that great line in that last Ghostbusters movie, overstimulation calms me. And that's my son, right? It's like he goes crazy when there's not enough stimulation. Now his underwear's all over the place and you gotta be able to executive function.

Yeah. Okay, well, Noah, what a pleasure to meet you. I hope I bump into you in Austin, my second favorite place on earth.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Come on now.

Do you ever get down there and get in the medicinal waters of Barton Springs? Of course. Oh, I'm there every trip.

The polar bear plunge on New Year's Day is. Oh, I should trek down to that. You float there and you're just trying to envision the year, what you're gonna do, how's it gonna go. And yeah, it's important to have those moments.

I was there in October and I did my first night swim there. I didn't even realize they were open at night.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 9 p.m. or something like that, yeah.

What a magical experience that is, nighttime at Barton Springs.

It is, yeah.

All right, be well, good luck with everything. Everyone watch Fargo.

Thank you.

It's striped, go ahead and say it.

No, I'm not gonna say it this time.

Why, I loved when you did that.

I know, I know you wanted me to and I just, I can't repeat like that. Okay. It is from London.

London?

It kinda has a smell right now.

Like gamey wool?

No, like it got some aromas on it, food aromas.

Would you take a sweater like that off when you go to the toilet?

No.

If you're at home?

No. Okay, you wouldn't be nervous.

that it would absorb some smell?

No, no, I feel like I like cooked a chicken or something and it like got on it.

Okay, were you wearing it last night when you cooked bolognese?

No, but it was hanging. Oh. Okay, and you got a new sweater.

Oh my God, look at this fun sweater.

Yes, it's very fun, it's very cute, it's loud.

It's so loud. George saw it and was like, oh, that's for Dax.

Oh, that's really funny. I mean, I love it, I love it on you. I think you should wear it every day.

Do you think I look cute in it?

I do, I really like it. I would never see it.

And think that's Dax.

Right, I mean, it's very him.

It's very him, but his point was, and I like it, he's like, it's the perfect sweater for you, because it's like cute and playful, but then you have your sleeves up and there's like some scary tattoos coming out. He's like, it's a fun mix.

Because it almost looks like Hello Kitty.

Or Mario Brothers. Right. Like, look at the back, has, look at those clouds and the mushroom. There's a teddy bear on front and it says Gucci Endorphin. It's an incredible sweater.

It's beautiful, though.

Yeah, I really like it.

Mm, it's fun to get new sweaters.

You know, I like my Babar's sweater. Cutesy.

Well, I have a story to tell.

Oh, okay, great.

Since I saw you, since we recorded, I had a middle of the night scare. So I woke up at 3 a.m. and there was a smell in the apartment. Not like the smell that's currently on my sweater.

Okay, not bolognese.

A smell that smelled like fire. It was a fire smell.

Would you wake up and say, oh Lord, it's a fire?

No.

Okay, remember that video? No. It's a woman on the news and she's explaining how her house was on fire. Oh. And she's like, I got up to drink a cold pop, walked into the kitchen, said, oh, Jesus, it's a fire.

Oh, I have not heard that.

Yeah, she references the Lord six or seven times in the story about her house burning down. It's pretty great.

Wow. Well, so then I went to the oven, everything's off.

Did you do a candle sweep? Sweep for candles?

Yeah, exactly. Nothing, then I go back, I close my eyes again, but I still smell it. Something's up. Right. Something's up.

That only stinks.

So then I remember, I have a heater under the floor with the floor grate.

Very traditional California bungalow style.

Yes, in these old ass apartments, they don't have central cooling or heating. And often what they offer you is for air conditioning, just a box in the wall, and for heating, a floor. Fire. Literally. It's just like a pilot light.

It heats up a big piece of metal that then radiates heat up.

Yeah, it's so antiquated.

I know, but I will say this.

Say what you'll say.

Remember when I was living at your house during COVID?

Yeah.

You were elsewhere and Erin and I were quarantining.

Yeah.

And it was March, so it was chilly. And I got to use it. Preferable is central heating, obviously. I do like walking by the source of the heat and being able to feel the heat coming out of there. It feels almost like a fireplace.

Yeah, but it just feels like-.

Just gotta frame it right.

Well, no, because it feels like it's bad for you.

Okay, yeah. Like there's carbon monoxide. That's fair.

I realized, oh gosh, it's probably that. It's probably dust or something is getting burnt. But then I remembered, a couple weeks before I was doing something in my bathroom, I forget what, like makeup. And I think a cap or something, maybe it was the back of an earring, something small flew off and it went in the grate, I thought. I was like, oh fuck, where'd that thing go?

Yeah.

So I go and I look and I see there's a hair tie in there. And I was like, oh, it was a hair tie that flew off and got in there. Which is very confusing because the holes are so tiny. Yeah. In this grate.